Significant reductions in vehicle emissions can be achieved, congestion can be limited, safety can be enhanced and travel times reduced by helping commuters and other drivers choose uncongested routes to their destinations. Numerous schemes have been proposed in the past for informing drivers of traffic conditions and presenting them with proposed alternatives when congestion is found. For example, traffic helicopters have been used for decades by radio stations to spot areas of congestion and suggest alternate paths that drivers may wish to consider.
With the growing popularity of GPS and hand-held computing devices, particularly those connected to cellular networks or the internet, other approaches have been used, such as graphical representations of maps with routes being color-coded to indicate levels of congestion.
Another approach to the traffic congestion problem involves “smart” traffic signals. For instance, railroad crossings have for decades been tied to traffic signals to help ease the flow of traffic on routes adjacent to railroad crossings when a train approaches. Further, certain systems have been installed that allow emergency vehicles such as fire trucks to change the state of a light from red to green so that the emergency vehicle can cross the intersection quickly with, rather than against, the signal.
In still another related area, various attempts have been made to collect traffic information from drivers who have, for example, GPS-enabled smartphones with them in their vehicles. Typically, such drivers do not find sufficient incentive to start up, and keep running, an application that will transmit their speed and location information to a remote traffic database.
It would be advantageous to have a display system that takes full advantage of the integration of technologies that are available to report traffic information to drivers and suggest routes based on that information, to communicate with traffic signals, and to collect traffic information from drivers. It would also be beneficial to take advantage of targeted advertising opportunities that such technologies can provide. Further, it would be advantageous to provide a system that enhances driver safety by reducing speeding while still taking advantage of advanced routing capabilities.
Significant effort has been put into mapping and predicting traffic signal status. For example, vehicle-mounted cameras may be used to determine the presence and location of traffic signals, as discussed in U.S. application Ser. No. 15/473,177, filed Mar. 29, 2017 and titled “An Efficient, High-Resolution System and Method to Detect Traffic Lights.” However, it may be difficult for such cameras to accurately distinguish light emanating from traffic signals from similarly colored lights in surrounding areas. This introduces significant risk that the detection will be insufficient for modern requirements, such as due to false positives (e.g., falsely detecting a green light) or false negatives (e.g., not detecting an upcoming red light) and renders the camera an unreliable source for traffic signal mapping. Further, building a global database of traffic signal states requires continuous observation, which may be impossible to obtain with vehicle-mounted cameras absent massive penetration.
For reasons other than determining states of traffic signals, many municipalities have installed public or semi-public webcam systems to allow interested parties to observe activities and weather conditions in various locations. Some such systems are fixed in their orientation while others are moveable, whether constantly panning, under control of municipal operators, or otherwise. At times, some such webcam systems may include within a field of view one or more traffic signals or other traffic controls (e.g. presence of a human traffic officer directing traffic at an intersection), or include other visual clues indicating the state of a traffic signal. While municipal and other cameras mounted or aimed at traffic signals are known to exist, no known systems for predicting traffic signal status have included, as an input, related data from webcam systems, such as an image showing a current state of a traffic signal. It would be advantageous to provide a system that enhances driver safety by automatically processing such available information.